How Nutrition Affects Your Health

Food matters! What you eat greatly impacts your health, and we want people to feel good and live healthy lives. If you feel sluggish, tired, foggy, or run down, what are the chances you’re going to feel like moving your body and getting exercise each day?

We’re not prescribing a meal plan or a particular diet here; there isn’t one single magic fix. We’re talking about eating real, naturally occurring, from-the-earth food.

How unhealthy eating habits can affect you

In early 2019, Bryan was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. From what we understand, chronic stress, lack of sleep, and at times a poor diet led to inflammation and this autoimmune disease.

After the diagnosis, doctors across several specialties told him his symptoms would likely worsen, that he’d be on medication for life, and that when the medication eventually stopped working, he’d need a bowel resection. So we started asking questions, beginning with the most obvious one: how does diet affect this? The honest answer from most doctors was some version of “maybe,” and one doctor told us plainly, “Diet won’t change this,” about a disease of the digestive system.

If people who feel healthy tend to share certain habits, sleep, stress management, and how they eat, and people who don’t feel well tend to share the opposite habits, it seemed worth asking why diet wasn’t part of the conversation. So we looked into it ourselves: research, other practitioners, and how food actually affects the body. It turns out many foods are inflammatory, and colitis is inflammation of the colon; other foods can help calm that inflammation down. We don’t believe there’s one diet that fits everyone, since compatibility with food varies from person to person, but changing what he ate made enough of a difference that Bryan has remained off medication, while still being monitored by his physician a few times a year.

How to avoid future health issues

We aren’t claiming nutrition cures any specific disease, and medication is genuinely necessary for a lot of people; we’re also not doctors prescribing a treatment. What we do believe is that consistent choices about food and movement add up over time, even when they’re hard to stick with, and that they’re worth taking seriously alongside whatever else your care team recommends.

Kaizen means continuous improvement, change for the better. We can’t improve on what we don’t know, but once we know better, we can do better.